DDN acquires Lustre business from Intel, significant investment to come

DataDirect Networks (DDN) has announced its successful acquisition of Intel’s Lustre File System business and related assets.

The company hasn’t disclosed the terms of the deal, but asserts the acquisition is a ‘bold move’ that will effectively combine Intel’s advanced file system technology with DDN’s substantial high performance computing (HPC), analytics, and cloud product portfolio.

DDN says it has spent the past decade developing technologies for data processing at scale targeted at on-premise or hybrid cloud environments, and the acquisition was a logical next step.

“We are very pleased to acquire from Intel all assets related to the open-source Lustre file system and to welcome into the DDN family an experienced software development team for which we have always had tremendous respect and admiration,” says DDN founder and CEO Alex Bouzari.

“Over the next few years, we are going to invest significant resources to enhance usability and to broaden Lustre’s capabilities and feature set in the direction of flash-enabled performance, analytics, enterprise and hybrid cloud.”

According to DDN, the Lustre solution is already deployed in thousands of data centers around the world in healthcare, energy, manufacturing, financial services, academia, research and HPC labs, consistently earning the number one spot as the file system of choice for the world’s fastest computers.

“Over the past few years, Intel has enhanced the Lustre technology and contributed to a now thriving Lustre open-source ecosystem,” says Intel Corporate vice president and Data Center Group enterprise and government general manager Rajeeb Hazra.

“DDN has the expertise to provide continued development and seamless support for existing customers. Intel will continue to participate in the Lustre community and collaborate on open source technologies that enable our strategies and products.”

And so how will it work post-acquisition? According to DDN, it will operate the Lustre team as an autonomous division within the company to ensure full and sustained support of the Lustre customer and partner ecosystem. DDN senior vice president Robert Triendl will head the division as according to the company, he has been instrumental in growing DDN’s involvement in Lustre over the past decade.

“Lustre users today are running some of the most critical and complex workloads in the industry. Lustre underpins leading deep learning and AI environments for autonomous vehicle development, supports the most demanding workflows in the life sciences and energy sectors, and enables powerful commercial analytics workflows in the cloud,” says Triendl.

“This acquisition, and our continuing cooperation with Intel, will ensure that Lustre remains the world’s leading platform for compute and data-intensive workloads, scaling from small clusters running enterprise analytics to the world’s most powerful compute systems with tens of thousands of clients, while further expanding its capabilities in AI and Cloud.”